Recently, the Internet Explorer development team over at Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test.

One of the most requested CSS features that has been implemented in IE8 (and is proven by the Acid2 test) is the implementation of the table values of the CSS ‘display’ property. These allow developers to specify via CSS that any given element should behave like a table, or a table row, or a table cell, thus allowing the creation of CSS-based tables without the use of tabular markup.

Obviously, tabular markup would be better in situations where it is semantically appropriate. The display of tabular data should probably be done with tabular markup unless there is an overriding factor. But for layouts, tabular markup is a bad idea because it is non-semantic; tables are for the organization and display of tabular data. There’s nothing wrong with conceptually mapping a layout to a table, it’s just a bad idea to implement that concept using non-semantic markup. So for years web developers have been handling CSS-based layouts using a variety of techniques ranging from legitimate to outright hacks. CSS-based tables give us yet another technique, one that has all of the strengths of table-based layouts while maintaining semantics.

So this is a significant milestone, and congratulations are due for the Internet Explorer development team. But let’s not forget that the standard governing CSS tables is the CSS2 Visual Formatting standard…which was published back in 1998. So it basically took Microsoft ten years–a whole decade-to implement it properly.

It’s true that standards are something of a moving target and are hard to implement because of that, and we all know how large corporations can move with the speed of a snail on Valium. But none of these excuse a decade of lagging behind both industry standards and your competition. It’s no wonder Firefox is rapidly catching up with Internet Explorer in market share in spite of the fact the Internet Explorer comes bundled with Windows.

We don’t want to turn this into a Microsoft bashing party, but we do want to call on Microsoft to be more proactive. Their record so far hasn’t exactly been inspiring. Maybe Internet Explorer 8 is a step in the right direction.

Jonathan Reid, Technology